I Wish I'd Made This: Netcode Edition

On the data journalism politics/sports site FiveThirtyEight, they have an ongoing series where they post about things they wish they had written and direct the reader toward the article in question. They’re always titled “Damn, We Wish We’d Done These (insert number) Stories This Month.” I’m going to go ahead and steal their idea about stealing ideas (which they stole from Bloomberg News, so it’s all fair game!), except of course, I’m going to try and point people toward great fighting game-related content that I wish I’d been smart enough to think of. There's a ton of misinformation floating around about online play in fighting games, but luckily, a lot of people much smarter than me have gone to great lengths to clear the air.

I'm going with the heavy hitter right off the bat. This article about delay-based vs. rollback netcode by Infil is the single best resource on the topic, bar none. If you're going to read or watch one thing about online play in fighting games, it should be this. Of course, it took us a very very long time to get to this point! Raising awareness of fighting game netcode has taken hard work from a bunch of different people. The inception of  rollback netcode can be traced back to Tony Cannon's creation of the GGPO networking protocol. He gave a talk about it EVO 2017, so if you're interested in the origin story of rollback as told by its creator, it's a great watch.

People using emulators and GGPO were the first to see the benefits of rollback. It slowly began to be used in official releases of ports of older games. One game that really brought it to the forefront was Lab Zero's Skullgirls and its programmer, Mike Z being very vocal about the benefits of GGPO. He's touched on it in interviews, but I think the most complete picture you'll get from him is in his Let's talk about ROLLBACKS! blog post. Any conversation about great fighting game netcode is going to reference Skullgirls, and alongside it, Killer Instinct. Adam "Keits" Heart is a huge part of the Infil article which I used to kick off this post, and he's a great resource for understanding fighting game netcode. He did an interview with Hold Back to Block, which I highly recommend.

Hearing from the engineers/programmers behind the creation and implementation of fighting game netcode is essential, but credit is also due to those who have focused on raising awareness of the issue. It's hard to think of someone who has done more here than Stephen "Sajam" Lyon. He's made a number of the videos about the topic, and he's put together a playlist of all of them. Many of the videos in this playlist explain or expand upon other stuff I've linked in this post, so if you're having trouble wrapping your head around any of this, Sajam does a great job of making the topic even more understandable.

Good fighting game netcode (or lack thereof) is one of the big things holding back fighting games from bigger and better things. We've got a long way to go, but luckily we have a lot of smart and passionate people fighting for things to be better.